I currently use Premiere Pro with a Matrox card for editing DV but I hope to get CS5 in the near future with a view to switching to AVCHD. Based on what I have read in this forum I put together specifications for an editing computer and requested a quote from a supplier.

LOL we used to post a pic of one of my friends from australia upside down on our profiles.

That nostalgia being revived, if it's your choice going with a budget of USD 2,000(I'm not sure the pricing thar in the outback) would be good.... Then the others(guys on teh forum) could help you specify the best hardware.... btw, you might wanna start a new thread.

Four hard drives at 2TB eatch to be configured as RAID5 - Seagate 7200 RPM

RAID card- Adaptec RAID 3405 (moved from existing computer)

Video card - nVIDIA Quattro FX 3800 (moved from existing computer)

BluRay - LG BH10

DVD Burnger

Two SSD drives for caching- not yet decided

I'd be interested in comments about the ASUS Rampage III Extreme. My reason for choosing it is the two extra SATA ports with 6.0 Gp/s as well the USB 3.0 ports. In addition the ability to tweak the clocking.

Your point is one I did consider when selecting this case, having gone through this a couple of months ago with a nVIDIA's Quattro FX 4800 card which did not fit into my existing tower. This case is 3.5 inches deeper than the one I have now and the hard drives are placed sideways so that the cabling does not extend into the case. I selected it in part due to the location it will have to occupy and the manner in which it vents. The biggest turnoff is the "red LED lit front fan", which, hopefully can be turned off, I mean the LED not the fan.

Your point is of importance as I expect to add another video card and this time one without compromize.

I'm in a position to build a new video editing coomputer for CS5. My budget is $2500. I have the CS5. Was thiiiiiiiiiiikng of getting two Hard Drives each two TB and mirroring them. Your thoughts please.

For editing, we believe a gaming computer is a clear choice. They are extremely fast for their price. We are using 4 Dell Alienware Auroras. We feel good about letting Dell do the engineering. They are easy to buy, dependable, competitively priced, and fast. With Dell Alienware, there is a large user base to lean on if you have a problem. We have had "0" problems in this first year of operation.

I, like most others in this thread am building a custom PC (for someone), the only problem is the budget is $1,850 CAD after taxes and shipping, so it's a bit more limited, I had some questions:

In the minimum requirements it lists RAID 0, is this to be a dedicated drive for rendering only? I was planning on doing a RAID 0 (500GB drives) and an OS Drive (500GB), as well as a storage drive (2TB), does this make sense, would all cache/rending point to the RAID 0?

I'm getting the GTX 470, with using this graphics card and CUDA, does this mean it no longer uses the CPU at all, or does it use the CPU and GPU now to do the processing of the video?

The components I'm looking at getting are as follows, right now it's a bit over budget, so I'm looking at possibly going with a less expensive motherboard and going down to 8GB ram.

Graphics Card - EVGA GTX 470

CPU - Core I7 @ 3.06Ghz

Motherboard - Asus P6X58D-E

Raid 0 - 2 x 500GB Seagate 7200rpm drives

OS Drive - 1 x 500GB Seagate 7200rpm drive

Media Storage - 1 x 2TB Western Digital Green drive

RAM - 12GB - G.Skill ripjaws Series 12GB (3 x 4GB)

Case - Cooler Master RC-690-KKN1-GP

Power Supply - CMPSU-750TX 750W (I've got to take a look at this, might not be enough)

Blu-Ray Burner - LG WH10LS30K

OS - Win7 Prof 64bit

Right now this is totalling around $1,950. First of all, does this setup look decent? It matches a lot of the others I've seen, I'm just not sure on the hard drive setup, Power Supply, and if the graphics card is doing all the work, maybe I could bump down the CPU a bit.

Thanks for the reply! I'll look for a bigger tower, hopefully there is one in the same price range.

I'm curious on the green drive, you definitely know better then I, but I wanted to ask. If media is being stored on it, why the need for 7200rpm? I understand if your actively converting to a drive then you need speed, but once your project is done, do you typically store it on a usb drive or slower large drive, or is that demand for speed still there during playback (in the case of uncompressed video I guess?)

Let's get the first obstacle out of the way: USB drives are ONLY good for backups, nothing else.

Green disks: about 30 - 40% slower than normal 7200 SATA disks. Imagine a timeline with 5 video tracks, a couple of audio tracks and a single disk is hard pressed to supply the data, even if they are static, to the CPU at a sufficient rate, especially if the fill rate goes up.

If you are talking not about a media drive but about an export drive, then a green disk is OK, speed is no longer important.

Ahhh, the one time I don't copy my message before hitting submit and it logs me out and I lose it

I did mean an export disk (assuming that means where you store your media when your done editing and it's been converted to it's final format).

To be honest I know nothing about adobe premier, I've done research to understand what the requirements are and different recommended setups, I guess the biggest thing I'm grasping at is the hard drives, and I think it's because I don't understand the workflow, I'm planning:

500GB 7200rpm - OS/Page File

RAID 0 / 2 x 500GB 7200rpm - I assume this is where you would keep all your projects as you were working on them for rendering/editing etc.. ? I know it's a requirement for Premier CS5, but it didn't really go into detail on what's to be stored on it.

2TB - I assumed the user of the machine would need somewhere to store his finished work, if this isn't needed, or a 7200rpm 1TB drive would be better, I can absolutely change it.

Thanks again for the reply, I really appreciate it, I just want to be sure I get the hardware and configuration right, so I don't buy all these parts and realize I should have orderex x instead of y

I just had a very similar system built, same CPU, Graphics and Mother Board. I would suggest, 24Gb ram (it is cheap right now) and this Mother Board supports eSata 6.0, I would use a couple of WD Black 6.0 1Tb drives in Raid 0 for Video storage. That is my setup and it works like a charm.

This chart will provide a picture of the top performing hardware suitable for Premiere Pro CS5. Choose your desired performance level, take note of the hardware and price it out on a website like newegg.com.

Personally, I would go with an Intel 980x processor, 24GB of RAM and an Nvidia GTX 580 card to power MPE.

Scott with ADK likes Mushkin RAM. One needs to consider recommendations from someone who builds video editing computers for a living. Personally, I have been using RAM purchased online from Crucial over the years without issues.

If you don't want to build the system yourself, have Eric with ADK build one for you. There is a big difference between going with a system builder specializing in gaming computers and one who majors in building video editing computers.

I favor the Gigabyte motherboards, but a lot of guys like Asus.

Harm has some great advice related to overclocking and hard drive configurations.

Hi Chuck - that CPU looks top of the range - I was more interested in the "economical" range (based on Harm's original post terminology) - we only do video editing say once every month or two after a holiday/trip, and then come back and try to reasonable job (not professional by any means) of pulling the best parts together. We use Adobe Premiere & Photoshop. The file types we seem to have currently are:

- *.dv - from our older (a few years old) digital video camera

- *.mts - from the video from our new digital video camera, that takes reasonable video

Currently based on reading to date (not too much yet) is something like:

* CPU / Motherboard

- Not sure (was thinking ASUS for motherboard, but model depends on CPU no doubt?)

- what sort of CPU/motherboard do you think these days fits into the Economical (not professional) category at the moment?

* Video Card - not sure whether we need something flash given the video formats we are dealing with (see above)? Someone suggested nVidia GTX470 or a Quadro card for Adobe Premiere work...

* Disk Drives

- dedicated system drive

- video drives - wanted to have data protection (and apparently Drobo's etc are not good for performance) so two (or three) SATA drives here in a RAID 5 configuration I was thinking? Not sure if there are any tips & tricks here to be aware of re RAID 5 usage with video editing?

Go with Win 7 64 Professional. Make sure it's 64, which is something I'm sure you already know. If you spend a little extra money, you will get something that is a pleasure to edit on. If you want to reduce the price a little bit, you should go with high rated non-green 1TB hard drives for your media drives. You could probably get by with a Corsair 750 watt power supply, but it's a good idea to check that out in one of the many online power supply calculators.

I just bought a laptop not too long ago and instead of purchasing something new, is there any way I can improve the performance of what I have? I mostly use my laptop for editing photos, but I now want to work with the highest resolution of video that I can. I noticed AE and Pr are a bit sluggish with the HD video I've been playing with. Here's what I have for my laptop:

Thank you for your response. I didn't know if it would be considered rude to start a new thread when one already exists. There's a lot of participation in this thread and I didn't think anyone would mind if I asked a few related questions.

The external disk is new and I haven't used it for anything yet. I was thinking of using it for storage/back-up. If you think it would be best used for something else, I'm very open to ideas.

Someone was able to help me in another forum. I'd thought I'd post his response here, in case someone else has similar specs and searching for answers on performance.

Copla_XT wrote:

For 8gb of ram, I'd leave at least 2gb for other applications. I don't know what plugins you use for Firefox, but that should work. If you have 4 cores, leave one for other programs. Minimum allocated for per CPU, 1gb should work well, maybe 2. Personally, I like longer ram preview over faster rendering. I like to see more than a couple seconds.

I tried it and it works so much better than the default settings. I hope this helps someone.

Good morning, I am building a custom workstation for a friend that shoots with a Sony EX1 camera and edits footage from that, P2 and AVCHD together in the same timelines.

I have read that it is recommended that you have dual hexa-core motherboards for this, but all the motherboards that support dual-hex CPUs are for servers and lack a number of the features this user needs such as USB 3, eSATA, on-board high quality sound. Plus, if Adobe is serious about the Mercury Playback Engine, I would think maxing out the Quadro card would be money better spent than on a second CPU, plus I thought video encoding wasn't very threadable so having 12 / 24 threads on slower processors wouldn't be effecient compared to 6/12 threads of a faster processor?

I would like to run the spec of the workstation I have planned to build my friend to see what you think.